Over the past weekend, I've developed a Train Scorer App for Android and am looking for some feedback. (This is for when you're playing the board game versions)

There's a couple out there already that I've used that I liked. However, the addition of points I felt was a bit clunky in having to re-select the player to add the points every time; or having too small of buttons to click.

This app focuses on that and makes it so once you select a player, you only have to SINGLE click to add the rest of the points up. And if you make a mistake or need to subtract tickets... that's a single click away as well.

I don't have an android device, but from what I can see, it's pretty easy to use and rather intuitive.
Maybe an option to change between how many players and what colours they are, rather than having 6 players 'active' for editing?
Might make it look a little simpler. Also allows people to play with Pumpkin trains if they so wish and still have their own colour active. Also: Marklin and Nordic have white trains as well, but with the white text, that may be difficult.

I like it so far. You've addressed your main issues with other designs and adapted your own, and for that, I applaud you.
Keep it up.

Of course I have a Windows Phone and an iOS device... haha.
I like this idea: even though it's a niche concept, I don't know how many times I've had to go over my train count (unnecessarily) in my head because I 'might have added wrong.' Even if it's not enough to convince me to get an Android, I definitely am thankful that people like you are dedicated to expanding this game.

Also, if it comes out on iOS or Windows Phone, make sure you tell me, because I'll snatch that right up

In terms of feedback, even from not playing it, I think two things may improve it (even if it's ever so so slightly): one is to add an 'Asian Explorer' button somewhere in there, even if it's the same points as longest route; the other is that the Globetrotter bonus is a +15 point bonus, not +10. Maybe this has been fixed, but from the screenshots of your game on the GPlay sire, this is there.
If you don't have much space, don't worry about the Asian Explorer bit, but if you can, maybe reducing the size of the 'station' button and adding the Asian Explorer there would be cool.

I saw there were some downloads with 7 inch tablets, so 7 inch tablet layouts are now supported today with update 1.21.

Leeroy1 wrote on Sat, 01 February 2014 02:55

In terms of feedback, even from not playing it, I think two things may improve it (even if it's ever so so slightly): one is to add an 'Asian Explorer' button somewhere in there, even if it's the same points as longest route; the other is that the Globetrotter bonus is a +15 point bonus, not +10. Maybe this has been fixed, but from the screenshots of your game on the GPlay sire, this is there.
If you don't have much space, don't worry about the Asian Explorer bit, but if you can, maybe reducing the size of the 'station' button and adding the Asian Explorer there would be cool.

I think what I need to do here is add a setting for which game you're playing. Currently there are no settings in the app. This setting would just change a few of the bonus values as well as adding/removing some of them.

I think I haven't played USA in so long that that is why I put +10, but in checking the rules on Days of Wonder's website, that is indeed the case.

I also need to add settings for colors anyway, so when I'm in there I'll be sure to add this. Thanks for the feedback!

Unfortunately I do not have a Mac to develop an iOS equivalent of this, but I might be able to develop a Windows Mobile version in the distant future. It might be a fun project (like this one) to try out Windows Mobile development.

There is a plain and simple train scoring app for iOS called "Train Counter". I'm not associated with it but I've been using it quite frequently (lastly on Saturday when we played USA and Europe simultaneously with a group of 9 people).

All it does is letting you select how many 1/2/3/.../9 train long routes a player build and then it gives you the score for that player.

You know what feature I want in a TtR scoring app? The ability to take a picture of the board and have the app recognize where trains are, and do the math for me. Set it up for one map to test it, then expand out to others from there.

With enough polish and if you were able to pull it off, I'd easily drop a few bucks on it in the App store.

You know what feature I want in a TtR scoring app? The ability to take a picture of the board and have the app recognize where trains are, and do the math for me. Set it up for one map to test it, then expand out to others from there.

With enough polish and if you were able to pull it off, I'd easily drop a few bucks on it in the App store.

This sounds like a good idea, but it's pretty difficult to pull off. I mean, it's not like it can't be done (it's very possible), but usually with recognition software, there are obstacles that you wouldn't normally come to with what I like to call pen+paper methods of coding (like this is, you can do each step with pen+paper, but this program makes it easier)

I'd love for some really experienced programmers to have a shot at this (jwitz10, if you're that level of skill, have a go. If it doesn't work, it's at least good experience?)

Finally got a chance to get back to this the past couple of days. New update:

1.30 - 3/11/14 - Added settings for colors, map and bonuses

Basically you can pick the map type you're playing and based on that it will adjust the bonuses. Nederland and India need some tweaking with this with their special bonuses. Custom is a fallback to the old behavior of showing all bonuses since I'm not sure which custom user maps are using which bonuses.

I just realized I also need to tweak the train counters since some maps don't have 'x' amount of trains to record. For example, USA may not have a 9 train length count. But now with the settings, this is at least possible to code going forward.

You know what feature I want in a TtR scoring app? The ability to take a picture of the board and have the app recognize where trains are, and do the math for me. Set it up for one map to test it, then expand out to others from there.

With enough polish and if you were able to pull it off, I'd easily drop a few bucks on it in the App store.

This sounds like a good idea, but it's pretty difficult to pull off. I mean, it's not like it can't be done (it's very possible), but usually with recognition software, there are obstacles that you wouldn't normally come to with what I like to call pen+paper methods of coding (like this is, you can do each step with pen+paper, but this program makes it easier)

I'd love for some really experienced programmers to have a shot at this (jwitz10, if you're that level of skill, have a go. If it doesn't work, it's at least good experience?)

This is something I always wanted to try to do... image recognition programming and parsing of data, but everything I take a look at this stuff, there's no absolute certainty you will get the correct answer... and it's quite harder than what I've been doing so far.

I'll take this into consideration as a bonus to the app if I can get through these other settings I mentioned in my previous post. This is most likely a pretty sizable effort so let me harden the app that exists today, and then I'll take a look into this.